Dave worked late last night so I decided to go on an adventure with my new kitchen-aid mixer (best birthday gift, everrrrr!).

I LOVE soft pretzels but have always felt that it's too much work to make them at home. Turns out, there are a lot of steps making it feel like work but the results were worth it for me. I couldn't wouldn't have done this without the stand mixer. Even though it only would have been 5-7 minutes of hand kneading, ain't nobody got time for that. Being able to slap on that dough hook and let it do the work for me was a major bonus.

I'm not going to type out the recipe, you can find it here. I pretty much followed it exactly except I used the brown sugar instead of barley malt syrup (who has that anyway?). Also, I only had kosher salt so I used that which is why you can't see the salt on my pretzels. But trust me, it's there. The salt is probably my favorite part of the pretzel. From start to eat, these pretzels took me a little less than 2 hours. But, half of that time was letting the dough rest.

I enjoyed rolling out the dough and doing the pretzel flip like I used to love watching at Auntie Anne's. I think next time I'll either do bites or twists. Or maybe make a couple bigger ones. The options are endless!